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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23216623">The Lullaby</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_feather_fiction/pseuds/black_feather_fiction'>black_feather_fiction</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Loki's Sing-Along And Other Mischievous Plot Devices [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Marvel Cinematic Universe, Norse Religion &amp; Lore, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Aesir masculinity is just toxic all around, Bor's A+ Parenting, Intersex Jotunn (Marvel), Minor Character Death, Mpreg, Odin (Marvel)'s A+ Parenting, Poor Loki (Marvel), Sad, Sort Of, Violence, magic is not kind</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 10:40:20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,610</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23216623</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_feather_fiction/pseuds/black_feather_fiction</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of how Laufey lost Loki and of how Odin found him. The story of an eye given away, of a name gained for it, and of a lullaby.</p><p>Companion fic for <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/14584104/chapters/33703416">The Prestige</a>, but can be read as an independent story.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Farbauti/Laufey (Marvel), Minor or Background Relationship(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Loki's Sing-Along And Other Mischievous Plot Devices [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1403773</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>77</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Lullaby</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Find me on Twitter - @FeatherFiction<br/>I use they/them pronouns :) &lt;3</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wylkSUS9Ofs">Of Monsters and Men – A Thousand Eyes</a></p><p>Laufey's use of the pronoun 'it' for baby Loki is deliberate, because in this universe, Jotnar children don't have an official gender until they inform others of what their gender actually is (aka in my version of Jotunheim, gender is not simply assigned). Note that Odin uses 'it' too, the old hopeless contradictory hypocrite.</p><p>As in The Prestige, I use "intersex Jotunn" as a trigger warning because as exactly that, a trigger warning, it serves its purpose. However, in my universe, having both a vulvina (and uterus) and a penis is the norm and not the exception for Jotunns, so this kind of anatomy is simply one of the Jotnar sexes. The characters thus don't represent the reality of intersex persons in the real world.<br/>In the same way, mpreg is not really accurate. Laufey's gender is male, and he gives birth, yes. But this is nothing special on this realm, and he does have the necessary  reproductive organs to do so. Since the issue might still trigger people, I have included it in the tags.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Loki was Laufey’s second pregnancy during a war that had gone on for decades already. And once more, and on from the beginning, he had been torn between the almost involuntary happiness that a pregnancy always triggered in him and wondering how by the Norns he would ever be able to carry this one to its completion while fighting the Aesir every day.</p><p>When his belly had not wanted to grow as it should, but had stayed suspiciously flat, he had thought that he had lost the unborn foetus already. Maybe its heart had stopped beating when he had fallen off that one cliff, or maybe when Odin had struck him in the stomach with Gungnir.</p><p>It would not have been the first foetus he had lost in such a way – his first wartime pregnancy had ended far too early – and he knew exactly what was to come: that he would have to wait and then would go into labour, only to give birth to a corpse.</p><p>He knew how to prepare, he knew what to expect.</p><p>Had he not borne enough of this kind of grief? He was weary of it.</p><p>But then, at night, he felt it, long before he would feel any kind of bodily movement – the tingling of seidr within him, so very similar to the tingling he felt each time he was close to his wife.</p><p>And he knew.</p><p>And he turned to his wife, took her small body into his arms, and wept with joy as he said, ‘Farbauti – it’s a mage. It’s not dead; it’s a mage, my love.’</p><p>Her laughter was as light and joyful as the source of the river Ifing at spring.</p><p> </p><p>The court celebrated the news, and all of Jotunheim celebrated the day the Jotun was born. Such a tiny creature slipped from Laufey’s womb that it would have taken no effort to give birth to it if the violent waves of seidr that the child had sent out in its distress had not exhausted Laufey so thoroughly.</p><p>It looked fragile, it looked like nothing at all, and Farbauti laid the child in his arms and he was so tired he barely had the strength to hold it, and was, at the same time, afraid of breaking it and could not understand how so much power could even fit into such a small body.</p><p>It could. He knew it could. Was not his own wife so very small, shorter even than her sister Gerdr? And in contrast to broad-shouldered Gerdr, his Farbauti was lithe and slim, and yet was brimming with seidr, a violent and relentless storm of ice to be unleashed on the Aesir warriors?</p><p>And yet, he could not help but wonder how it could be that this nursling did not burst from all that it contained.</p><p>Once the baby had been washed, its markings became easily readable and even to Laufey, who was no mage and educated only in the basics of these matters, they seemed uncommon. Mysterious and yet they held a strange beauty that he could not describe but in the very words already written on the skin.</p><p>Farbauti and the Seers of the court too were astounded by the lines, mesmerized, and they traced them, whispering to each other, bending their faces down to the child, laying their ears on its skin as if to listen.</p><p>And to them, Laufey knew, the seidr spoke.</p><p>He himself could hear the ice speak when he was in the temples. There resided enough ice magic in any Jotun to listen.</p><p>But the voice of the baby’s seidr was still so small.</p><p>Gerdr travelled from her home deep in the mountains to the palace to meet the nursling, and took it into her strong arms, closed her eyes and listened just as closely as Farbauti had, and then sang the words, rocking the baby, as if that could make her understand better.</p><p>Or maybe it was just a lullaby.</p><p>The baby fell asleep in any case.</p><p> </p><p>On the fifth day of its life outside the womb, Farbauti and the Seers pronounced the name:</p><p>Loki.</p><p>Laufey laughed. He was strong enough now to leave his bed and he knew that soon, the war would have him again.</p><p>But for now, as he cradled Loki, he could just be that, warmth for this new life.</p><p>Loki was not a common name either. In fact, Laufey knew of only one other jotnar Loki, and that was Utgard-Loki who had been living isolated from the rest of the Jotunns in his remote castle in Niflheim for millennia now.</p><p>He was a strange fellow, that Utgard-Loki, also a mage, and a powerful one at that.</p><p>And Loki’s markings certainly spoke of power.</p><p>The more Loki grew, the more clearly Laufey could hear them too.</p><p>The spoke of fire, of change, of transformation, of destruction and creation. They roared at him like Farbauti’s storm, and yet they tingled softly at the same time like the strung up ice chips that guarded the entrance to the holy grounds of the temples.</p><p>When the Seers spoke of Loki, their faces lit up – Loki was their new hope, Laufey realised, a greater hope than their current king could ever be, because the seidr ran stronger in Loki than in any Jotunn they had seen before. Because it seemed Loki lived in seidr and off seidr, <em>was</em> seidr, and the fault lines of the ice shifted where Loki’s cradle was put.</p><p>They spoke of the chosen one, the one fated to determine Jotunheim’s destiny once and for all, the one to tip the balance.</p><p>Farbauti and Gerdr were more careful in their interpretation of the markings, but even they could not deny that the infant had been given a key role by the Norns.</p><p>Gerdr still liked singing the words of the poem on quiet evenings, rocking the infant to sleep when Laufey and Farbauti were too busy or too tired to take care of the child themselves, and the infant listened.</p><p>Laufey still wondered if that was Gerdr’s way of trying to understand.</p><p>‘It is because Loki is a contradictory puzzle’, said Farbauti when Laufey and she were sitting at the cradle one day, ‘that Loki will become important. It is because the interpretations of its poem are manifold and irreconcilable that Loki will be the wind that brings change.’</p><p>She looked neither happy about that, nor sad, neither relieved nor worried. Just mesmerized.</p><p>But that was the mage she was, almost too impartial about her own fate, and that of her loved ones.</p><p>Laufey loved her for it, for this impartiality he would never understand.</p><p>Three years later, he would rage at her for the same.</p><p>And she would not answer to his reproaches, would not be able to, but a corpse in his arms.</p><p>When Farbauti went to her last battle, she knew she would not return. She knew what would happen. The Norns had whispered it to her in her dreams. And she went into it, neither sad nor happy.</p><p>She went into it mesmerized.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Gerdr did not share her sister’s serenity.</p><p>On the eve of Farbauti’s death, she shouted at Laufey, and her rage made the ice shift in the palace, made the floor and the walls crackle. When Gerdr was angry, her eyes and shock of hair made her look like a blazing fire barely contained by the blue of her skin.</p><p>To put it mildly, she was not happy about his decision.</p><p>He understood.</p><p>She did not like the risk. She thought like a general, not like a king. But he, he had to think like a king. And he knew that both victory and defeat were so close to him now they might have walked right next to him, victory touching his right shoulder, defeat his left, and only one of them would take his hand, and the other would evade him. He also knew that if they retreated now, if they ceded Odin power over that young Midgardian island, small as it was but full of fae and fire demons and ice spirits and one of the few places where one could get access to Gaia, that would have amounted to pushing away victory and firmly grasping defeat’s hand.</p><p>‘You are deluding yourself, Laufey!’ Gerdr said at that. ‘Defeat has us in her grasp already. We have been losing territory for years. The only question now is how much will still be lost. Open your eyes, my king! We do not need Midgard, we never did – but what if Jotunheim herself should fall?’</p><p>And yet they needed Midgard. They needed a counterbalance to the growing power of Asgard, to Odin’s tendrils that reached for Alfheim, even as far as Muspelheim. The Svartalfir were gone, eradicated like a pest; the Vanir were defeated, Frigga sold to Odin as a war prize and hostage, Frey a mere puppet king. The dwarves had retreated into mercantile neutrality.</p><p>‘How long’ Laufey replied. ‘How long until Odin will want Jotunheim too? How long do you think, dear sister, will we be able to walk our heads held high, if we let Odin win now? He will push his advantage if we show him weakness! He will push us to our knees and our noses into Asgard’s dirt because he has no respect for the Jotunns! What does he see in us except beasts? We have to teach him to fear us, or we will be his pets before long!’</p><p>‘And what will we become if you don’t stop this madness now?’ Gerdr said. ‘This war is over, don’t you see? Your knees are already on the ground, you stupid oaf, and your nose is but a few inches above the dirt, and Odin’s foot is on your neck, pressing you down. You have already lost! And yet you could still lose so much more! Don’t offer him your heart on a platter, Laufey, when you cannot bear its absence! Don’t, you utter fool, give him what we cannot live without!’</p><p>He attempted to strike her for that, but she evaded his blow, swift as the fish in Jotunheim’s rivers, spat on the ground before him and teleported away.</p><p>He could have had her arrested for that. He could have had her tried.</p><p>But he knew her temperament, and her power, and he knew that no matter her words today, on the morrow she would fight against the Aesir with everything she had.</p><p>They needed her. They needed every mage they could spare.</p><p>He took every mage they could spare. He took Farbauti with him. Farbauti didn’t protest, even though he knew Gerdr had gone to her and shaken her after the council meeting as if to shake her out of her serenity.</p><p>Laufey had never understood how a person could be so imperturbable and yet so loving as his Farbauti, so even-tempered and yet unleashed on the Aesir, she turned into this merciless force of nature…</p><p>But then, he never understood mages in general. That did not stop him from loving them. That did not stop him from loving her.</p><p> </p><p>They were some mages they could <em>not</em> spare – those charged to protect his youngest. His older sons were close to maturity and could fend for themselves, he knew, but Loki they had to guard most cautiously during the king’s absence. Laufey stood above Loki’s crib in their bedroom, and smiled as the tiny fingers grasped his thumb, pulled at it, as the tiny mouth tried to wrap around it, a wet tongue exploring his rough skin. Loki let out a gurgling sound, and the ice in the ceiling formed patterns that the child had wished into existence.</p><p>‘I will be back before you know it’ Laufey said, and after clearing his throat, he silently sang the song he had heard Gerdr sing so often. Loki’s poem that had become also Loki’s lullaby.</p><p>Loki fell asleep, as always.</p><p>And he left them with the nurses, with the guards, with more mages truly, than he thought he could do without.</p><p> </p><p>On the morrow, on Midgard, Gerdr and he did not talk about their fight. Gerdr ground her teeth, but she pointed out strategically advantageous spots on the map of the island nonetheless, and suggested where they should position the regiments.</p><p>The horn was blown and the slaughter began.</p><p>Gerdr was a fury, a lethal blaze. Farbauti was a storm of ice. The casket was in Laufey’s hands, and at the moment he unleashed it, and its power streamed through him into this young, mortal world, he was convinced he could not ever be vanquished.</p><p>He could.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>When Odin hung from Yggdrasil’s branches, for nine days and nine nights, suspended somewhere between life and death, he learned many things. He saw many worlds, and posed many questions, and each answer he took and wanted more.</p><p>He had gone far and had taken great pains upon him to come here, had prepared this quest for such a long time, so to hang in this quite uncomfortable and precarious position, and indeed his soul and body were in anguish, for to be not alive and yet not dead is an unenviable state, but for the first time in centuries, his mind was not in anguish, his mind was content.</p><p>For Odin, for reasons maybe only known to the Norns, had been born with an addiction, an insatiable thirst. But where other Aesir could not part from the drinking horn or could not stop eating, he could not stop asking questions, driving his tutors and nurses up the walls on from an early age.</p><p>Later, he annoyed his father to no end, who liked to send him away, to distant mages, distant scholars, or just on a quest that would either occupy his son, or kill him.</p><p>Bor had no talent for magic, less time for questions, and even less inclination to be a father – so there was little in Odin he could see the point of.</p><p>Children were useless until they were rivals to the throne, and mages were Ergi until they were trouble.</p><p>Odin learned to know and yet evade Death at an early age.</p><p>He was still a young adult when he suspended himself from the World Tree, another quest that had been risky enough it might have even met his father’s approval, had he been aware of it. But Odin knew how to keep his most important quests secret, and he knew how to handle risks, and in any case, hanging there felt like coming from the fiery planes of Muspelheim only to find a cool river, its water fresh and sweet and overabundant.</p><p>He drank and drank and drank, and yet the thirst remained, and so he drank more, and thought that there was no question he could pose that could not be met with an answer. He thought there was no demand for knowledge that would be refused.</p><p>Until he enquired about the Jotnar temples. Until he enquired about the Jotnar skin markings.</p><p>There, he met silence.</p><p>‘Why do you reject me?’ he raged, for already his mind revolted, and his thirst resurged, and he knew there were many other questions he could ask, but suddenly the river he drank from tasted stale, mouldy, and he knew with certainty that as long as he would not be answered his questions about the Jotunns, no other answer would satisfy him.</p><p>‘You know not the language of the Jotunns’ he was told. ‘And the answer you seek does not exist in any language but the Jotnar one.’</p><p>‘So teach me the Jotnar language!’ Odin commanded.</p><p>‘This I cannot do’ he was answered. ‘For I am a river, and I have travelled through many lands, but the Jotnar secrets belong to them only, and do not leave their borders.’</p><p>‘So if I drink from you there, in Jotunheim, will I know?’</p><p>‘How could you?’ he was told. ‘You would walk in their realm, and so you would have to bend to their rules. You would need to know their secrets to be able to drink from me there, and yet you cannot know their secrets without consuming these waters to begin with. It is not yours to take, young Aesir. Ask me another thing and I will answer as you desire.’</p><p>‘Tell me then’ Odin said, ‘if the Jotnar secrets do not leave Jotunheim’s borders, are they born there? Or do they flow through other realms before they enter their icy world?’</p><p>‘What you seek is my very source, young Aesir’ he was told. ‘And that is guarded by Mimir who you cannot vanquish, not now and not at the height of your power, raven god.’</p><p>But Odin laughed and said, ‘Who says I have to vanquish? There are many paths Odin can take, and victory is but one.’</p><p>And he began the arduous and painful task of pulling himself back up, back to the world of the living. His time had been running out in any case, and who knew, if he had not been refused this one demand, if every of his desires had been fulfilled by the river, maybe he would have forgotten himself, his body, and his soul would have detached itself from this body and from Yggdrasil and had followed Death to Helheim.</p><p>As it was, he survived, if barely.</p><p>He took a long time to recover.</p><p>As soon as he judged himself strong enough to defend himself against more or less thinly veiled attempts against his life, he went back to Asgard, to his father’s library, wasted on the old fool really, and learned what was there to learn about Mimir.</p><p> </p><p>The need for a sacrifice did not surprise him. He knew the rules of magic well, and what was one eye in the grand scheme of things?</p><p>Did he realise then that this sacrifice would make him blind to other things than just the material plane? Or was it already part of the price he paid that he could not see, could not truly understand, what his sacrifice meant, what consequences it might have?</p><p>What consequences learning the Jotnar language might have?</p><p>Whatever might have passed through his mind then, he tore his eyeball out with his own fingers, blind to his own pain, offered it to Mimir on his open palm, and in return was allowed to take a mouthful, one mouthful only, from the source Mimir was guarding.</p><p>He had been allowed to choose the mouthful however, and he knew exactly how to choose.</p><p>The water trickled down his throat, and the aching and crackling of the ice transformed into songs, and the meaningless skin markings of blue beasts transformed into poems.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Laufey did not know any of that.</p><p>Maybe if he had, he would have made different choices. If he had been aware that his enemy possessed his realm’s most well-guarded secrets, he would not have relied on them to protect him and all that he loved.</p><p>Odin took care not to show his hand during the war. The spells and curses he wove to kill Farbauti did not reveal how he could subvert her defences.</p><p>The magical shield he wove against the Casket of Ancient Winters did not show how it could deflect a power that he was not supposed to understand.</p><p>Odin Allfather, millennia after he had overthrown and killed his father Bor, centuries after he had acquired Huginn and Munnin who were his main hunters for the prey he still desired most, had posed many questions and had received many answers, had learned many forms of magic, and he could disguise one spell under another, and Gerdr had been right, Laufey had been losing for a while.</p><p>Odin ended Farbauti that day, though Gerdr evaded him once more, and even though he could not tear the casket from Laufey’s fingers, he managed to get in one blow with Gungnir that cracked it, and the ice storm it had created died, and even Laufey knew then that retreat was the only option.</p><p>They barely had the time to retrieve Farbauti’s corpse from beneath the others. They barely made it back to Jotunheim.</p><p>Odin followed.</p><p> </p><p>The decisions Laufey made then were made in a rush, and in a haze of grief that his thoughts could barely penetrate.</p><p>What do we do with the casket, my king?</p><p>It is damaged – Laufey, I think it is dying.</p><p>Laufey, brother, Odin and his army are advancing on us, we have to retreat, we have to – please, let go of Farbauti, we cannot-</p><p>Gerdr was not angry anymore. She was shaking him, like she had shaken her sister, but she was so tiny, how could she move him?</p><p>He looked down, and there was his wife, so flaccid in his arms, her eyes open and empty and he-</p><p>He screamed, and pressed that small body against his chest, and winced when he heard a bone break, and wailed all the louder for it.</p><p>Please, Laufey, we have to make a decision, Odin is coming, and we have to hide the child, and the casket is dying, we need to bring both to the temple, now!</p><p>He nodded. He nodded and stood up.</p><p>He did not let go of Farbauti. They brought the casket to her temple, placed it on the altar in the heart of it, where they knew it would heal.</p><p>Laufey laid down his wife’s body on that altar too, hoping, against all reason, that Farbauti’s soul had not left her yet, maybe it was still lingering, maybe being so close to Jotunheim’s essence…</p><p>‘I will kill him for this’ he growled.</p><p>‘No’ Gerdr said sadly. ‘No, you won’t.’</p><p>There were not many options in the end. They did not guess the secrets Odin had gained for the price of his eye, and so they relied on the temple keeping their most valued treasures safe.</p><p>They had taken Loki’s crib with them and placed it in the temple’s heart, right next to the altar, laid down the child in it. Guards and nurses and mages would be there to protect it.</p><p>More mages, he knew, than he could do without.</p><p>Laufey again bent down to Loki, again said those words, ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’</p><p>It felt like a lie.</p><p>He again sang the lullaby.</p><p>The ice around them pulsed with the words, patterns glittered along the walls, repeating the verses, memorising them.</p><p>And the cracks of the ice shifted around Loki, around the casket.</p><p>And Loki, who had been crying, fell asleep.</p><p>There still came the moment when Laufey had to straighten up, to turn away.</p><p>They had agreed that luring Odin as far away from this place as possible was of the highest priority now. Whatever else they could lose, not Loki and the casket. Not ever.</p><p>And Odin still wanted to defeat Laufey, did he not?</p><p>So he would run after him. And Laufey would run away from his child and away from the injured heart of Jotunheim until he could run no more, and then he would stand and fight (and die, though nobody said it. Nobody needed to).</p><p>Gerdr had suggested the plan and Laufey readily agreed. He did not think that it was revenge that drove her.</p><p>Just strategy. Always strategy.</p><p>He should have listened to her sooner. But even that thought was dull, smothered under the weight of such a small and light body as Farbauti’s was.</p><p>They ran.</p><p>They waited for Odin to follow.</p><p>Odin took too long – and when he did show up, he had a child in one arm and the casket under the other.</p><p>The child had pink skin now, like the enemy, like the Aesir. Green eyes. Shape shifter. It didn’t cry in Odin’s arms. It was calm and silent.</p><p>Laufey fell to his knees at that moment, his eyes on the child.</p><p>Loki, the one who would determine Jotunheim’s fate, in the arms of his enemy, of the murderer of his wife.</p><p>Loki had chosen their side.</p><p>‘Traitor’ whispered he, though he knew he was, once more, lying.</p><p>But as the tip of Gungnir touched his throat below his chin, as Odin lifted it and forced him thus to lift his head too and look up at his better, like the pet he would now become, he knew the truth would do nothing but tear him apart.</p><p>If he also perished, what would remain?</p><p>Loki – the one who would tip the balance. The wind of change.</p><p>Byleistr and Helblindi were still so young. So very young.</p><p>Traitor, he thought. Traitor.</p><p>Maybe he would even believe it one day. Maybe he would.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Odin had not known, giving Mimir his left eye, that obtaining the Jotnar secrets would allow him to trace the casket one day, to find the temple. That it would be what would help him vanquish its guards both living and those purely magical. That it would be what would help him navigate the temple’s maze, evade its traps.</p><p>He had been young at the time; a war with Jotunheim had not been foreseeable. And his own ambition had not yet stretched beyond surviving the next century.</p><p>In the end, he still almost failed that day in the temple, even with all the experience and might and skill of Odin Borson at the height of his power.</p><p>The mirrors strung up on strings at the entrance of the holy area were full of curses he had to evade by evading his reflection in them. The ice that covered the mountain tried to bury him under avalanches, tried to make him trip and fall into crevasses opening like mouths to swallow him whole. The ice spires at the entrance of the temple tore at his heart, his very soul, for they were created only to let Jotnar souls in. He had to fell them, or they would have torn his soul from his body. The inside of the temple was just as treacherous, full of dead-ends, a ground that could become slippery so suddenly, ceilings that caved in on him, and everywhere the Jotunns who knew this place much better than he did.</p><p>And he, he could only listen to the ice, to the mirrors’ whispers, to the rumble of the mountain as it sent an avalanche his way, to the crackling of the ice as it pulled apart to create a crevasse. He understood the curses of the spires, and the fault lines in the ice guided him even as the cave was trying to smother him.</p><p>Everything they thought they were telling each other in secret, he listened in to.</p><p>He left destruction in his wake.</p><p>Broken wards, caved-in corridors, corpses. Jotnar blood trenched the ice under his Aesir boots. Piece by piece, he knew, he was undoing this temple, flaying it of its wards, taking its every protection spell apart.</p><p>But he knew that if this war was to be won, he could not leave the casket here. And he knew that if he took it, Jotunheim would be maimed beyond healing. They would never become a threat again.</p><p>He also knew that the realm would start to slowly die.</p><p>In a way, he knew.</p><p>Understanding the Jotnar language was not mere knowledge of course. It ran deeper than that, and he felt his heart beating to the rhythm of the ice’s pulsing, as he ran down the corridors of the cave, and he felt the cracking of the ice deep within his very being, and he recognised the beauty of its song. The beauty of the flashing patterns.</p><p>He had to recognise it – otherwise, he would have gotten lost.</p><p>He also knew that this was exactly what he was destroying at the same time.</p><p>It felt vile to continue, and a part of him resisted against the crime he was committing. And yet it was necessary, and he pushed on.</p><p>It was only after the last of the guards had been slain in the heart of the temple that he recognised the body curled around the casket.</p><p>Farbauti.</p><p>The casket itself pulsed. It had already healed itself, though it could do nothing for the corpse that seemed to hug it.</p><p>He walked towards it, picked the casket up and rammed Gungnir right into the altar, into the temple’s heart that Farbauti’s body still was lying curled around.</p><p>A blinding light.</p><p>The whole mountain trembled.</p><p>A rumbling, as the ice around him moved. Parts of the ceiling came raining down, and he threw up a magical shield to protect the cavern. He knew that more corridors had caved in. Maybe he would have to blast his way out. But without the old ice magic, nothing would be there to resist him, would there?</p><p>And then, with another, almost quiet sigh, the temple let out its last breath, and died.</p><p>The pulsing of the ice around him went dark, went still.</p><p>Silence.</p><p>Something so marvellous, he thought, and it could be snuffed out so easily.</p><p>Well, comparatively easily.</p><p>Even the ice he was standing on felt like a corpse.</p><p>He suddenly wished nothing more than to leave.</p><p>And then, in this dark, in this silence, Odin heard the improbable sound of a baby crying.</p><p>Had it cried before? If so, he hadn’t been aware – but sometimes he did lose some of his awareness when he entered his battle rage.</p><p>He pulled Gungnir out of the altar that crumbled away, Farbauti’s corpse sliding awkwardly and half-way to the ground, and he commanded a  mage light to shine in the direction of the wailing.</p><p>Now that he looked, he saw the overturned crib, the child lying on the ground.</p><p>Small. Far too small for a Jotunn.</p><p>A mage.</p><p>A child mage hidden in a temple, right next to the Casket of Ancient Winters. Well guarded and cared for – he recognised now that some of the Jotunn he had slain were not warriors. Nurses then? That could only mean… but Farbauti and Laufey had only had two children, hadn’t they? What had his ravens missed, what had they not seen?</p><p>Odin walked towards the nursling quickly, bent down.</p><p>Farbauti’s features were easily recognisable, illuminated by the mage light. Laufey, as to him, seemed to have passed down mostly the raven black colour of his hair.</p><p>The baby’s face was scrunched up, it was wailing.</p><p>A mage prince.</p><p>Odin knew what had to be done. He had been lucky that both Byleistr and Helblindi hadn’t had any talent for seidr. But this one… he could feel the magic from where he was standing.</p><p>Bash the little beast’s head in, take the casket, and go.</p><p>And yet, now that the markings held meaning to him, he could not help but read...</p><p>Odin pushed the cloth that covered the nursling down with Gungnir, to reveal more of them.</p><p>His eyes widened as they spoke to him, of change, of destruction, of creation, of fire. They screamed at him, and they whispered, and they sang, and they laughed. So much at once, and all in contradiction to each other.</p><p>He stood up and turned away, to silence them.</p><p>But the baby kept wailing.</p><p>It sounded like Thor.</p><p>Odin went to the crib, put it upright. There, a name carved into the wood.</p><p>Loki.</p><p>He stared at the name, thinking of the only other Loki he knew of, then chuckled silently. What a fitting title, he thought, for the poem he had just read.</p><p>It seemed the Jotunns had a sense of humour after all.</p><p>And he couldn’t help but wonder what kind of person this new Loki might become, with these strange markings, with this ominous name.</p><p>It would become no one, if Odin rammed Gungnir’s shaft into its face that night.</p><p>It was still wailing.</p><p>‘Be silent, beastling’ Odin barked.</p><p>It kept crying on.</p><p>By the Norns, it sounded like Thor. Why did all nurslings sound alike?</p><p>He went back to the baby, took it up.</p><p>‘Will you not stop weeping?’ asked he. ‘See, I have picked you up, you ugly thing.’</p><p>And he found it ugly, with its blue skin, its red eyes, because it had been ingrained into him from his early childhood on that this must be what ugliness looked like.</p><p>Only he couldn’t find it ugly, for he understood its markings, and they were of a beauty nobody could deny.</p><p>Did he realise then what kind of dangerous contradiction he was entangling himself in as he began to recite to the child its own poem, in an attempt to calm it down?</p><p>‘Sleep, little Loki’ said Odin in the Jotnar language, and rocked the child like he had rocked Thor when he had been at that age. ‘Sleep, for you have been picked up, and you are given warmth. For you have been picked up, and you will be given food and shelter.’</p><p>Did he realise then what kind of promise he was making, as he hummed and recited the poem again, and then sung it, for he knew it wanted to be sung?</p><p>And the child calmed down, slowly, and slowly, it stopped crying.</p><p>He stroked its face, and found it monstrous, and found it beautiful at the same time.</p><p>When its skin washed pink and the eyes turned green, Odin was not exactly surprised. He knew that the Jotnar mages were natural shape shifters, and the extraordinary power of the child was obvious to anyone who understood something of the matter.</p><p>And the temple had died, hadn’t it? It couldn’t disallow the illusion. Not anymore.</p><p>‘You’re trying to trick me already, you clever thing. I should bash your head in, little beastling’ said he, and reason told him that he really should.</p><p>It was what his father would have done.</p><p>Children were useless until they were rivals to the throne. Mages were Ergi until they were trouble.</p><p>‘Oh yes, you will bring nothing but trouble upon my head.’</p><p>You are the enemy, little beastling.</p><p>But Odin was not his father, was not Bor, and never had been. Could not be, even when he tried.</p><p>For once, he had more imagination. For example, he could imagine quite a few uses for a powerful and loyal shape-shifting mage. Or for a Jotnar hostage. Or such a clever little thing that Loki had the potential to turn out to be.</p><p>If anything, he had respect for cleverness.</p><p>Was that what decided him?</p><p>Or was it that when they baby started crying again after he had spoken these brutal words, he couldn’t help but start rocking it once more, and sing, the Jotnar poem, and Aesir lullabies?</p><p>That the thought of striking the child made his stomach turn?</p><p>That he had to smile when he looked into this face, and wonder at those words written on its skin, and it was small and needed him, so he had taken it up, taken it up knowing what that essentially meant, and yet it wouldn’t have needed him had he not slain every other Jotunn in that cave, had he not killed the temple.</p><p>When he blasted his way out of the cave, a baby in one arm, the casket under the other, did he understand that he took with him a creature that he already feared and yet that he already cared for? That he looked down upon, because that was how he had been taught, and yet could not help but recognise it in its grace and splendour? He could not fight - much less defeat - the Jotunns without respecting them, and yet he could not respect them, for if he did, how could he rip out their heart and leave them to rot?</p><p>How could he ram Gungnir then into the altar of a <em>temple</em>…</p><p>Did he guess then that this decision to take Loki that was far less conscious and rational than he pretended it to be, would be the first in many he would make about Loki and that would too be driven by this inner conflict that he could not resolve?</p><p>The man who sheltered the tiny Jotunn from the icy wind would watch Loki grow up and recognise himself in him and look away – because Loki could not be similar, was different, too different, and in any case, Odin did not enjoy thinking about his youth, his father, the indifference with which the one who should have sheltered him regularly sent him to what should have been his death.</p><p>Just a rival, just…</p><p>Just a young mage, hungry for knowledge, just…</p><p>Just a beast pretending to be a person, and yet he knew their secrets, knew that everything he had been taught about them had been a lie and yet sometimes, when he looked at Loki, he would think: there you nurse the enemy at your chest.</p><p>And then he would think: I have robbed you of your parents and your home, and still you look to me for approval – don’t you realise how vile and twisted that truly is? And he would wish in sleepless nights that he had rescued this infant from a terrible fate other than Odin Allfather. He wanted to believe it. Sometimes he did.</p><p>And often, when he would look at Loki, he would see nothing but his wayward son, and would not <em>want</em> to see anything but that. And he would see no wrong in raising Loki as an Aesir, and holding him up to Aesir standards (and see him failing them – but did not any true mage fail those? Did not he? He did not like to think about that too often, lest his enemies see the weakness in his face).</p><p>The man who patiently fed Loki with goat milk until they could return to Asgard did not know that even asking question after question, there were some essential questions he had never posed, would never ask, that there was knowledge he would not think to seek, because he was blind on his left eye, and he should have known that the price for such sacred secrets could not be that low.</p><p>No, it was a deadly high one.</p><p>It was so high that it took him millennia to even guess at what it was he had given away. It took him more than a thousand years even after that day in the temple, until one afternoon, after losing his youngest once more to the Mad Titan, probably forever, he would look in the mirror and recognise an old fool there who only pretended to strive for knowledge anymore, but who was, in a way, not less ignorant than his father, not less narrow-minded, not less self-content.</p><p>Not less cruel.</p><p>An arrogant king who had sought out the rare fruits of knowledge once, only once, and since then relied on two birds to feed him the ever-same bland food.</p><p>He put his hands on the mirror and thought of Loki, of how Loki had turned to him that day in the vault, his hands on the casket, his skin blue, his eyes red, and Odin, he hadn’t been able to suppress the disgust.</p><p>As if… as if he didn’t know better, as if after all that time…</p><p>And yet, he had been able to read Loki’s markings, know their beauty, know the truth, and Loki could not read them, had never learned.</p><p>… had never learned.</p><p>Loki who had said to Laufey: ‘Know that it is Loki Odinson who will kill you.’</p><p>Odin grabbed at his eye-patch, ripped it off.</p><p>Pried open the lid and looked at the empty eye socket. Examined his loss.</p>
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